What is Healing?
At first glance, the word healing in the context of healthcare may seem to be curing an illness, helping someone else get healthier, or even easing symptoms of a disease. However, the field of medicine doesn’t have an operational definition of healing. Although medicine is considered a healing profession, it places more emphasis on the physiological mechanisms of curing patients.
According to “The Meaning of Healing: Transcending Suffering”, healing may be operationally defined as the personal experience of the transcendence of suffering. Physicians can enhance their abilities as healers by recognizing, diagnosing, minimizing, and relieving suffering, as well as helping patients transcend suffering (Source). This means that physicians can help patients who view suffering as an opportunity for affirming spiritual values and see suffering as a spiritual test (Source).
Healing has also been associated with wholeness, narrative, and spirituality. It has been described as “an intensely personal, subjective experience involving a reconciliation of the meaning an individual ascribes to distressing events with his or her perception of wholeness as a person (Source).”
The increasing values of empiricism and Cartesian reductionism in Western medicine have certainly brought upon many advances in science and treating ill patients. Yet, these advances came at the price of healing an ill patient, particularly when there is no physical cure for a chronically ill patient. However, throughout history, spirituality and health have been intertwined. In many present day Western hospitals that were founded by religious orders and organizations, one can almost always find a chapel present. Priests recite morning and night prayers over the intercom. A cross can be found in every room of the hospital. Many religious texts offer definitions for health and healing, the most prominent being the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments.
Even though curing and healing may appear to be very similar, the difference between the two can be summarized through a quote by Susan Howitch from Absolute Truths: “A cure signified the banishment of physical illness, but a healing could mean not just a physical cure, but a repairing and strengthening of the mind and spirit to improve the quality of life even when no physical cure was possible.” Such spiritual care can be found in palliative care and hospice care in which the relief from suffering is prioritized for patients who are experiencing chronic illnesses.
By: Sreenidhi Saripalli
